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Factual errors: Upon Frost's first meeting with Nixon at La Casa Pacifica, the former president tells a story about presenting Soviet Premier Brezhnev with a Lincoln Continental. Although Brezhnev was given several American cars as gifts, only one was a Continental. This was given to him in 1973 at Camp David, not La Casa Pacifica.See more »

Frank Langella's performance as Nixon is truly moving in this
remarkable film by Ron Howard, which gripped me for its entirety. As
someone who grew up during the Watergate hearings, and who reviled
Nixon as the embodiment not just of corruption but of the worst kind of
interventionist, even genocidal, American politics, this film gives
substance to a man who, in later years (especially the GW Bush years,
which make Nixon look like a political and intellectual colossus),
achieved something of a place in history beyond the scandal of
Watergate.

But what Frost/Nixon - and in particular Langella - does is give
humanity to the man. We see his arrogance, his love of power, his need
to win (hinted at wonderfully in a moment when he is jogging in his San
Clemente home to rousing music), but we also see his inner conflicts,
his regrets, the fact that perhaps more than simply his crimes
regarding Watergate haunted him - that the impact of his decisions on
South East Asia were not entirely remote from him, either. And in a
sequence that I will not reveal, to avoid spoiling the plot, we also
see a hint of his madness, for it is that, I think, rather than
senility. (You have to see it to understand this.)

Ron Howard and playwright/screenwriter Peter Morgan have achieved a
remarkable feat in adapting the stage play, which sadly I did not see.
Not for a moment does this feel stage bound; instead it is a compelling
human portrait of two men - for Frost is fascinating, too, and Michael
Sheen captures both his much criticized (at the time) surface gloss and
also his deeper fears - but above all of the impact that each of our
decisions, large and small, and not least if you are leader of the
"Free World," have on us all.

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